Injuries received by the occupants of a wrecked vehicle often become more serious, in some cases even fatal, because of the inability of a rescue squad or other emergency personnel to remove the occupants from the vehicle promptly so that such occupants can receive immediately any necessary medical assistance. This inability to remove occupants results primarily from the fact that the occupants are pinned between badly crushed portions of the wrecked vehicle, or because there is no opening in the crushed vehicle which is large enough to permit the occupant to be reached or removed from the vehicle.
In attempting to remove such occupants from a wrecked vehicle, rescue squads have heretofore employed a variety of tools with varying degrees of success, principally acetylene torches, crowbars or similar prying tools, and jacks. Acetylene torches have the obvious disadvantage of presenting an exposed flame which could further injure the occupant, and which may be extremely dangerous when gasoline fumes are present at the accident site. Additionally, the removal of vehicle parts by using acetylene torches is relatively slow. Crowbars or similar prying tools are often ineffectual because it is impossible to obtain a proper pivot point in the wreckage which will provide the necessary mechanical advantage to separate the crushed metal of the vehicle, and jacks frequently cannot be used effectively because there is no opening in the vehicle which will permit the jack to be placed within the vehicle, or because there is no convenient base point against which the jack can bear in attempting to open or separate a crushed part of the vehicle.
It has also been heretofore proposed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,577,881, issued May 11, 1971, to employ a portable rescue unit designed principally for removing the doors of wrecked vehicles, such unit including a hydraulically operated pivot arm which is attached to a door of the vehicle, and an abutment plate engaging the frame of the vehicle beneath such door, the abutment plate acting as a stationary bearing point from which the pivot arm is moved to pull the attached door away from the vehicle frame. While this unit may be effective for removing vehicle doors in many instances, its application is generally limited because it is often impossible to locate a rigid point (i.e., the vehicle frame) on the wrecked vehicle in the vicinity of the vehicle part to be moved against which the abutment plate can properly bear.
The apparatus of the present invention requires no such limited bearing point on the vehicle frame or otherwise, and it has substantially universal application in quickly spreading or separating any bent or crushed portion of the vehicle.